The basic concept, not terribly new by the way, is that browser proxy settings cannot be enforced on browser plugins, which happily ignore them in some circumstances, e.g. when establishing a direct TCP socket connection.
So if you're using a proxy to hide your internet address (like Tor users do), embeddable objects like Java applets can betray you, revealing your real identity to advertisers spying on your habits or, worse, to the police of a repressive state.

RSnake's interesting proof of concept exploits JavaScript + LiveConnect , and it apparently works on Gecko-based browser with Java™ installed only. I didn't manage to make it work on Opera, even though it does support LiveConnect.

So I decided to defer bedtime a bit and I put together my own quick deanonymizing proof of concept, which relies on the almost ubiquitous MacromediaÂ® FlashÂ® and works in any web browser, like Internet Explorer, supporting the Flash player (no need for JavaScript, either).
The

XMLSocket

ActionScript object is used to bypass browser's proxy setting and connect to a tiny server written in Perl, listening on port 9999 and echoing client's IP.

Victim must visit a malicious web page: most likely scenarios are clicking an external link from an incoming message or surfing porn while checking email from time to time.

The malicious web site forges a POST request to GMail's "Create Filter" wizard, possibly using an autosubmit invisible form to build a filter which forwards incoming messages to a mail recipient owned by the attacker.

Since user is already authenticated, her session cookie is passed along with the forged request and the GMail filter gets silently implanted, with all the output hidden inside an IFRAME.

The new GMail filter now acts as a persistent backdoor stealing incoming messages, and it will go unnoticed forever unless the victim is a power GMail user who creates or edits from time to time her own filters, which are deep buried in the "Settings" user interface: I, for instance, never saw them until yesterday!

Very clever and very dangerous.
As I said, this surely counts as a 0day public full disclosure: no matter if pdp omitted an explicit PoC. How many of us, having minimal web coding experience, wouldn't be able to build a working exploit using the info above?

CSRF Countermeasures

As usual, now that's been publicly disclosed, this vulnerability is being patched very quickly by the great Google development crew.
Nonetheless, many other holes of this kind are still around. That's why CSRF is called â€œThe Sleeping Giantâ€: some web coders may still need to learn how to fix or prevent them, and users surely want to know how to protect themselves.

1. Web Developers

Please use form keys!

Generate a random identifier (form key) every time you display a form meant to be submitted by authenticated users only.

Echo your key as an hidden field of the form and bind its value to the user session data kept on the server side.

As soon the form is submitted, compare the returned key with the one stored in session data: if they don't match, throw away the request because it is probably forged.

The above is a simple yet effective anti-CSRF technique. It will work fine unless a further Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability is present too, allowing attacker to read your form key on the fly and forge a seemingly valid requests.

2. Web Users

This GMail incident proves how even the best trained web developer in the world can fail at implementing CSRF countermeasures.
Most of the existing literature about XSS and CSRF will tell you that poor users can do nothing to protect themselves from these attacks, but this is blatantly false.
A quite radical, not very usable but effective approach would be using different browsers (or different profiles, if you use Mozilla derivatives) for each "sensitive" web site you access, and force yourself not to follow any external link nor browse any other site while logged in.

Anyway, if you prefer not to make your life miserable by spawning multiple browsers and scanning every single link with a magnifying lens, your answer is, once again, Firefox + NoScript (sorry to sound repetitive, but that's it).

First of all, automating a POST request is trivial if JavaScript is enabled on the attacker site --

form.submit()

-- but just impossible if malicious scripts are blocked by NoScript.
The obvious objection, raised for instance by both pdp and Adrian Pastor at GNUCITIZEN, sounds like:

The attacker could simply build an invisible POST form and disguise its "submit" button as a regular link or an image, then social-engineer his victim into clicking it and so have the exploit launched no matter if JavaScript is disabled.

True, but NoScript effectively defeats this attack as well!

A common misconception about NoScript is that it just blocks JavaScript on untrusted sites.
It certainly does, but NoScript actually enhances browser security in several other ways.
A very incomplete list:

It implements the most advanced and effective anti-XSS protection available on the client side.

NoScript's anti-XSS protection deploys various specific countermeasures, e.g. HTML/JavaScript injection detection, URL sanitization on suspicious cross-site requests, UTF-7 encoding neutralization and many others.
One of them also provides an effective defense from CSRFs of the kind affecting GMail: in facts, NoScript intercepts POST requests sent from untrusted origins to trusted sites and strips out their payloads.
This means that, even if the attacker exploits a scriptless vector to launch his POST CSRF through social engineering, NoScript users are still safe as long as the malicious site is not explicitly whitelisted.

Giorgio, sounds good, but doesnâ€™t that break things?
I mean, CSRF is one of the most fundamental Web characteristic.
Disabling it might be OK for people like us, but for the general population, that is a no go!

Petko, my friend,

The very foundation of the Web is CSR (Cross Site Requests, AKA Hyperlinking), not CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery) which is an unwanted side effect of bad coding practices.

RFC 2616 defining HTTP (hence, in a certain sense, the Web itself), clearly states that while GET requests (the ones we generate by following hyperlinks or submitting a search form) are idempotent, i.e. should not modify the receiving system, POST is reserved to requests which cause a permanent change. NoScript just prevents untrusted sites from modifying data held by trusted sites, and this looks Pure Good™: why could you want the contrary?

Even if you actually wanted the contrary, you can either use the "Unsafe reload" command, available whenever a request is filtered by NoScript, or permanently configure some sites of your choice as unfiltered recipients of unsafe requests by listing them in NoScript Options/Advanced/XSS/Exceptions

The NoScript feature we're talking about has been in place for more than six month now.
I guess it's transparent enough if security researchers like you, Adrian or .mario -- people "like us", much more attentive to what happens inside their browsers than "the general population" -- did not even notice it... ;)